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National Book Awards Acceptance Speeches

Theodore
Roethke, Winner of the 1959 National
Book Award in Poetry for
Words for the Wind

Acceptance of the Poetry Award
for Roethke by Daniel G. Hoffman, a judge from the 1959 Poetry panel.

Were Theodore Roethke here to accept
this honor tonight he might have said, as he did once
before when some of the poems in Words for the Wind
were anthologized, “These poems – and I
say this detachedly and humbly – are not, in any
final sense, mine at all: they are a piece of luck (good
or bad, as you may choose to judge).” His poems
of course have been judged by all his readers, and by
the poetry jury whose decision you have just learned.
I have been asked to stand as a delegate to you of that
jury. I’d like to mention some of the qualities
in Mr. Roethke’s verse that led us, after praising
several other very fine poetry books published this
year, finally to agree on Words for the Wind.

Mr. Roethke has won acclaim as a poet
who uses the original resources of his technique to
extend the range of experiences, the depth of life,
that his poetry can clarify for himself and can communicate
to his readers.

It is always good to let a poet be his
own mediator, and fortunately I can again quote Mr.
Roethke himself. He recently wrote of his work,

“I have tried to transmute and
purify my ‘life,’ the sense of being defiled
by it, in both small and formal and somewhat blunt
poems, and, latterly, in long poems which try in their
rhythms to catch the very movement of the mind itself,
to trace the spiritual history of a protagonist (not
‘I’ personally), of all haunted and harried
men.”

He wrote that he tried in these new poems
“to make this series… a true and not arbitrary
order which will permit many ranges of feeling, including
humor.”

The first page of these collected poems
promises, in lines written twenty years ago,

My heart keeps open house
My truths are all foreknown
The deed will speak the truth
In language strict and pure

Mr. Roethke is true to this uncompromising demand upon
himself. His early poems dramatized the emergence of
the self in a world of growth and menace, the child’s
world of his father’s greenhouses. This world
he has called “both heaven and hell, a kind of
tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan…
it was a universe.” Then he sunk the shaft of
his self-discovery into what he terms “the muck
and welter, the dark, the dreck” of his later
poems. Yet, he says, “I count myself among the
happy poets.” And it is true that we find exhilaration
in Roethke’s work, for he writes,

Being myself, I sing
The soul’s immediate joy.

He sings the joys he has earned through the strictness
of truth of his poetic protagonist and the purity of
diction in his poetry.

As we can do a poet no greater honor than to read
his verses, I will conclude with the final stanza of
the title poem from Theodore Roethke’s Words
for the Wind. These words celebrate the joy that
Roethke sings, being himself:

What time’s my heart? I care.
I cherish what I have
Had no temporal:
I am no longer young
But the winds and waters are;
What falls away will fall;
All things bring me to love.